Payday 2: I like you guys too

Welcome to Payday 2

I've been playing this a shit ton over the last few months.  I've been playing with my good friend Kira, that's her mask... the amount of comments we get it rather absurd and I love it.

Payday 2 represents something absolutely wonderful in the gaming world, a good community.  I'm a recluse, I dislike people in a general sense and let's be really honest here, the multiplayer world of gaming is fucking god awful and I hate them.

The Payday 2 community is absolutely lovely.  I can't stand to play with pub scrubs in any other game, but I will go out of my way to boot up Payday 2 to meet new people.

I don't really know how to describe Payday 2.  Lot's of people have played some form of the 4 player coop game genre.  It may be Left 4 Dead, it may be Alien Swarm (please play this game,it's lonely right now), but you've never met these people.  Let me explain as simply as I can, even the hackers are nice.  Yep, they're awesome.

Smells like profit

Payday 2 is an inherently flawed game, there's no getting around it.  There's no denying that there are good builds and there are terrible game builds.  You can respec, so that's nice.  But it's so god damn endearing and engaging that the balance issues don't really bother me.

You get to spec two skill trees on your way to level 100, there's some good combos, there's some bad combos and there's a couple of skill trees that if you don't spec one specific skill people won't like you.

I'm not going to speak in all caps again but please infer the excitement I feel for this game.  It's horribly balanced, has really odd AI with some really odd reasoning behind they're actions but holy shit, I've rarely felt such a sense of achievement from a game.  Landing on Mun might be the closest I can get.

There is no feeling in the gaming world better than pulling off a Pro Job flawlessly with some of your new closet friends.  I started playing this game with 14 friends on my friends list, I now have 32 and I love them.  There's this massive bond of brotherhood you form with your fellow heisters as your chug your way through the missions.

There's moments in this game that define you, shape you, make you feel like a team player.  There will be a point in your heists where you will "Go loud", this means that you're going to take the bank or store by force.  This involves a series of extremely choreographed moves, you need someone or two people on guards to answer their pagers, you need someone on crowd control you need someone on pedestrians, you need the situation under control and if a single person fails it's all over.  And the absolutely amazing part is, this goes off well, frequently.

Those guards are down and taken care of, two flawless headshots in a move cycle.  The person on the crowd chimes in with "All good on the floor, How's outside?" Ready to ditch and run to assist.  The two on the guards VoIP with  "All set, who's got the drill?"

I'm serious, this is a normal regular game with public game randoms.  Even better is the feeling when it all goes to shit, which it does often and a stranger's voice over the the VoIP says, "Okay, we'll hold up here, get those medkits down, we're going to need ammo, watch for the specials and focus on getting everyone up."

The whole game goes to shit on a really regular basis and everyone just roles with it.  I've never met a better set of people in random games than Payday 2.  They're just so accepting of fuck ups.  Maybe you missed a pager because the guard slides down a set of stairs, it's happened to the best of us, maybe you didn't notice that pedestrian outside before they called the cops, this shit this happens, and people realize it happens, I've made a lot of my Steam friends through this scenarios

And the most wonderful part, is that a number of hours into the game you will become that person. I wish I could add this game to my CV as "Leadership Experience"  I have become the calm voice on the other end of the microphone.  "We can do this, we need medic kits and ammo dropped.  Who has the most powerful weapons?  Let us know if you're getting low, I have the perk for armor piecing on my pistol so get primary ammo first."

Get a bit of sun

Now, here's where I'm going to talk about the shit.  There's unfortunately a lot of it.  The game is good but not because of it's mechanics.  There's a ton to be frustrated about.  For the biggest example, you can't restart any heist at any point without mods.  So my friend Kira and I got really fucking good at suiciding to restart because as soon as everyone's down you can restart the day with no penalty.  If you install HoxHUD you can restart, but it's technically a hack,

And the hackers are abound.  They're actually rather nice, which is something very rare.  The Hackers with grant you a huge amount of money and allow you to complete super difficult heists with no challenge what so ever    They'll generally tell you that they're hackers and don't hold a grudge if you kick them.  I managed to get all my achievements via legit means by kicking hackers at their request (not to brag but I've done Pro Job Framing Frame on the hardest difficulty, #humblebrag)

But honestly there's not even close to enough flaws to not recommend this game.  It feels so good to play and win.  And as a huge salute to Overkill because when you download their DLC it just means you can "start" that new heist, but the ability to join that DLC heist in not restricted.   That means I can experience the new heist with my friend who bought the DLC with no restriction.  I can try out the new DLC before I buy it.  The weapon DLCs aren't so forgiving but there's enough people with them that it doesn't matter.

I won't ask you to buy this game, I'll ask you to join the community because it's amazing, it gives me hope for games in the future having at least half as good of a community, I love you guys.